I would like to add a comment to
my article "A Christian Perspective on Time" (September 90). In that article I
suggested that God created space and time for the purpose of depicting "separateness"
and that there is a scriptural and factual basis for believing that space and
time are each three-dimensional and that both progress or expand at the speed of
light. I suggested that this would lead to common-sense explanations for the
constancy of the speed of light and for what has been termed the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen
("EPR") paradox.

I noted that locations in coordinate time have no corresponding positional
component in a spatial reference system. Photons originating from a distinct
source in a temporal system would map into a spatial system in a purely random
fashion and would therefore appear as diffuse background radiation in the
spatial system. I suggested that the microwave background radiation might
represent this sort of phenomena but felt that X-ray and gamma ray photons must
also be included.

I did not know at the time I wrote the article that the existence of an X-ray
background has been known for decades:

Even the most contentious people usually agree that the
night sky is dark. Don't try arguing the point with an astronomer, however. In
1962 researchers discovered that when seen through instruments sensitive to
X-rays, the sky glows with a bright and oddly uniform intensity. This
pervasive radiation, rather unpoetically known as the diffuse X-ray
background, has eluded easy explanation. Roughly 25 to 30 percent of the
background has been attributed to quasars. . . . The origin of the rest has
been a persistent mystery. . . . The spectrum of the X-ray background closely
resembles that of a thin, hot gas. (Scientific American, March, 1991, p.
26, "X-ray Riddle: Cosmic background is still unexplained." See also Astronomy,
April 1991, p. 22, "X-rays Light Up Philadelphia").

Again, I believe that the pursuit of "scriptural physics" will lead to new
insights into such puzzling phenomena.